Embodiments relate to an apparatus and a method for writing data to be stored to a predetermined memory area, which may, for example, be applied for detecting cryptographic attacks.
In cryptographic systems, so-called side channel attacks may be performed in order to gain cryptographic information from the crypto system. For example, fault analysis is one type of various possible side channel attack in the field of cryptography. The principle here is to induce faults into cryptographic implementations in order to reveal internal states from a processor or an associated memory.
For example, a smart card containing an embedded processor might be subjected to high temperature, unsupported supply voltage or current, excessively high over-clocking, strong electric or magnetic fields or even ionizing radiation to influence the operation of a central processing unit (CPU) or associated periphery like, for example, a main memory (e.g. a random access memory, RAM). Here, due to such an attack, write-operations for writing back data to the main memory may be corrupted such that, e.g., data is written back to wrong memory addresses.
Hence, it is desirable to provide a concept to detect such wrong memory write-operations, possibly due to malicious side-channel attacks.